from the say-what-now? dept

You may have heard about the recent tragedy at the Belgian Pukkelpop music festival, in which a tent collapsed in the middle of a big storm and four people died. This came soon after a series of other mishaps with stages collapsing, including at a Cheap Trick show, a Flaming Lips show and the big collapse at the Indiana State Fair, which resulted in multiple deaths as well.

It does not sound like anyone's trying to get out from paying what they owe, but are just trying to explain what happened. Alex Schroeder on BoingBoing did a "loose translation" and came up with:

"The crashing down of the podium of the Pukkelpop rock festival that killed five and injured eighty last August 18, is maybe not due to the violence of the storm. Confronted with multiple similar catastrophes, the experts of insurance companies see it as the unexpected consequence of the falling disc sales. The bands have a vital interest in giant concerts, they rent giant podiums overloaded with video equipment and spots. The rain and the wind do not destroy more often than before, but when they fall, the damage is much greater."

That seems like a pretty weakly supported assertion. I'm not sure that the importance of concerts automatically leads to more video equipment, but whatever. Either way, it seems like a pretty big stretch to somehow pin this on file sharing.

Obligatory:

See the actual cause is filesharing...
It makes more people aware of the bands that they learn to love.
They show up at the concerts to buy the shirts, posters, trinkets and experience what an MP3 can never capture and deliver.

*popcorn*

The crashing down of the podium of the Pukkelpop rock festival that killed five and injured eighty last August 18, is maybe not only due to the violence of the storm. Confronted with multiple similar catastrophes, the experts of insurance companies see it as an unexpected consequence of the falling disc sales. The bands having a vital need in giant concerts, they rent giant podiums overloaded with video equipment and spots. The rain and the wind do not destroy them more than before, but when they collapse (the podiums), damage are greater.

Can someone show me file sharing is referenced at all...? I was expecting some interesting claim from the insurance companies, not some stretch of the imagination for make "falling CD sales" to mean "file sharing", as opposed to something more plausible like.... "falling CD sales".

Why does this mean file sharing? What about drop in popularity, or not releasing a new cd or single n a while, or people instead buying the music in digital form?

This article smells of a slow news week and a pro-'free file sharing' attitude.

I absolutely must get the website or IP of the stage. Guess I missed downloading part of it. Could someone pass that on next time? It's no fair that everyone else got a piece of the stage before it fell and I missed out.

Re: Response to: fb39ca4 on Sep 16th, 2011 @ 9:02pm

No, it's OK. The person that should apologize is the ass-hat at the record label who ordered overloading of the rigging with equipment to get more profit and then blames falling CD sales (always file sharing to an RIAA member) as the cause. It's like the Flip Wilson character Geraldine: "The devil made me do it!"

Re: Insurance

I would hope that Mike would ask you to keep your political comments to yourself.

Actually, they may be on to something, but without much of an explaination. If the only money left in music is the performance side (especially in music that appeals to a younger, more likely to pirate crowd), then I am sure they would go all out to make their shows the best possible, in order to charge premium ticket prices.

If they are bringing more and more equipment, setting up larger grandstands, and overloading them to make the most money possible, there is the porential for problems.

I will say it takes a big leap to go from "falling record sales" to "blame piracy", only on Techdirt could that happen without to many people noticing.

the weak link

I was going to write that the argument might actually be logically correct, that file sharing might have been a contributing factor (although not culpable-- that's a common fallacy), but then I noticed an assumption hidden in the middle:

Bands that are less successful tend to have more stage equipment.

Of course in reality that's the opposite of true, but in order to make a link to file sharing via the truth, the newspaper would have to admit that other true thing, about how file sharing can make a band more successful.

It's an unimportant causal connection, made via a double-false-negative, like saying "cheap medication is bad because it leads to old people driving cars and killing people-- uh, because their pharma stock isn't doing well enough to allow them to hire chauffeurs".

Re:

Can someone get stats about the % of money a band made from live shows vs music sales in say 1970 vs today?

I'm not sure exactly what they make today but if I remember correctly I think Jimmy Hendrix only got paid around $3000 for Woodstock. Also I live in Indiana and one of the groups that was going to play the fair later that week moved to a different place to play but they donated the tickect sales they already had to the victims of the fair deal and that was $500k. So between those two I think today artist make a couple dollars more then back in the 70's.

Re: Re: Re: Insurance

Exactly. The story doesn't talk about Piracy, only Torrent Mike does. It is these sorts of logical jumps that make his stuff so hard to take sometimes. Nobody talked about piracy, he just wrote his story like they did.

Re: Re: Insurance

Actually it has nothing to do with the stage or the equipment, it was the tent that crashed do to poor safety bolts. It seem everybody is blaming the equipment/musicians and not reading the actual story.

I don't know what the #1 is refering to

Yes, there was a stage collapse in Canada, but it certainly wasn't in Corner Brook or Gander, Newfoundland, nor was it in the smaller towns of Grand Falls-Windsor or Deer Lake, or the tiny town of St. Anthony, which the #1 circle is approximately centered on. In fact, I can't think of any major concert related mishap on Newfoundland in the past decade. If, in fact, they meant the Ottawa concert, then I hate to say it, but they're more than 1500km (~1000 miles) off.

My brain hurts...

Sometimes I read these stories and I have trouble getting my brain to make sense out of them. I find it easier to read far out Sci-Fi books, where the technology is way out there, than to read these wild stories.

Wait, I thought the newer HD cameras were smaller and lighter? shouldn't the weight of the equipment be going down? Also LED light fixtures weigh less... And If they are buying and hanging more equipment, isn't it their responsibility to also buy heavier duty trusses / stages to mount them too? EVEN IF they were correct that piracy has caused them to hang more equipment, piracy shouldn't be responsible for them not also buying the proper equipment to mount it on.

that's like saying jacking a 30-ton house with a 2-ton car jack is the Fuzzy Dice's manufacturer's fault.

Re: Obligatory:

Ah, I get it now.... Pirates downloaded and stold part of the stage resulting the the collapse

I was having a hard time figuring out how to link the file sharing with the stage collapse, but using the legacy industry logic:

Piracy = Theft,
Pirates wanted the data from the show/stage,
therefor we can conclude that Pirates stole the stage supports, which was the direct cause of the stage collapsing (because correlation always equals causation, and all we have to show is that pirates 'stole' something and therefore they have to be to blame).